Flint, Michigan. Not a place you'll hear mentioned in the "Pure Michigan" tourism spots. And it sickens me to hear that a Republican Governor who appointed Republican cronies to run a bankrupt city is still in office after poisoning the water of a city of 100,000 people by use of untreated Flint River water.
Would this disaster have happened if the people affected were rich and white? Probably not. One of the mantras of the GOP is mindless cost cutting - if one breaks with the orthodoxy of "no new taxes". They have no compassion for the poor, and months after the water mains were contaminated by leached lead, neither the governor nor the government of which he is in charge has any plan on how to fix this problem.
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The other day, I had the privilege of having a conversation with a "person of color" who is in my circle of acquaintances. I noted that thanks to the internet and our mass media, it is now impossible for an intelligent person to ignore the racism that has been built into the structure of society. (Before we go too far here, I have to note that "racism" is only a partially correct word here. Although these problems mostly affect people of color, they also affect poor whites in similar ways.) We've seen how Ferguson, Missouri's law enforcement policies hurt the predominantly Black community. We've seen how Chicago's police department has had a "hall pass" for many years, where police could easily get away with killing innocent people of color because of a "Blue code of silence" and institutionalized corruption in the police department. And now we're seeing the poisoning of the people of Flint - with no one having a clue about what to do next, because of the size, complexity, and cost of fixing this major problem.
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I don't like using the word "Racism", because it only talks about the problems that affect people of color. The word doesn't talk about the structural problems that affect isolated poor whites in places such as Appalachia, many of which are associated only with people of color. For example, in many states, when a person is convicted of a felony (and has served his/her time), that person is disenfranchised for life - no longer is he/she able to vote in public elections. Many rights and privileges are never restored to the felon - even when none of them were abused in the act of committing the crime for which he/she was convicted.
Structural problems beset both the rural poor (who are predominantly white) and the urban poor (who are predominantly people of color). Jobs that pay a livable wage have left their communities. In Appalachia, coal mines have shut down, leaving large numbers of isolated towns to live on the government dole. In the inner cities, the manufacturing jobs that once provided a leg up for the urban poor are gone, leaving only those service jobs that have salaries well below the poverty line for those lower skilled people looking to work. (In both cases, higher education is unavailable to them, as both the local schools leave them unprepared for college work, and that the effective price of college (even with grants and loans) is way too high for many to afford college. This leaves many of the poor (in both rural and urban settings) to do business in the "shadow economy".
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The "Shadow Economy" is one of great risk. For some, it is turning what were once "Food Stamps" into cash by trading "food stuffs" (which in some states include sugary, carbonated beverages) for cash, goods, and services. In one online article I read, the effective price of sexual favors in a rural shadow economy (net cash, after translation from food stamps) was as little at $13.50. That's much cheaper than the price of legally provided sexual services in a Nevada bordello, where oral sex costs roughly $100, and Coitus costs roughly $200 - as of 2002. For others, it is the ability to participate in the drug trade - where one's criminal record has no standing on whether one gets hired or not. With the exception of the drug kingpins, people on the low end of the drug trade (e.g.: street dealers) make less money per hour (according to the people who wrote "Freakonomics") than they would if they flipped burgers at the local McDonald's.
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So where do we go to fix this problem? The rural poor see the people in the "big city" as the enemy. How else could Ted Cruz have gotten away with slandering Donald Trump for having "New York Values"? But one has to contrast this with the Reverend Al Sharpton's knee jerk defense of Tawana Brawley - even though her claims were discredited later on. His constituency has just as much disdain for rural areas of this country, as the rural areas help to perpetuate the racist myth that the poverty in urban poor areas is caused by the poor alone.
To me, the only way to answer this question is the way LBJ answered it. Remove color from the equation and look at the problem as an issue of both socially and physically isolated communities which have been effectively alienated from the larger society. My question becomes: How do we integrate both rural and urban poor back into the larger society. Hopefully, we can answer this question sooner, rather than later....
P.S.: It looks like the Flint Water Poisonings may now be treated as a criminal matter.
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